Areas of intersection for B2B commerce and the Big Data

Today big data is the hot topic of discussion in marketing and companies big and small alike are still scratching how can they take advantage of this technology in their various areas of operations.

Generally articles around this area are like- you will lose all the competition to the rivals or will lose the competitive edge of the company if you will not embrace the data. Well, in true sense its nothing like that and this article is a very humble attempt to separate the key fact from all the hype surrounding the big data. In this article we will try to identify the areas for the organizations small and big alike where they can began tapping into the power of the big data to give their business a boost.

Do you really know what big data is?

There are many definitions present but none of them can appeal to a common man. So, defining in simple words:

Big Data is extremely large volume of data that can be analyzed to reveal certain patterns, characteristics, trends and associations related to the human behavior.

Today, with the availability of cheap cloud storage utilities like Microsoft Azure, Amazon web services and many others many companies are storing the large quantities of data to give a boost to the data-driven culture.

Identifying the problems which Big Data can solve

So, you used one of the cloud service for gather all the data now what? Now, is the time to identify the problems which your organization intends to solve using the big data. In short you are supposed to identify the existing pain points of the organizations and the future possibilities as well.

With this understood let’s take a look where B2B commerce and Big Data intersect.

• Connect the dots between marketing and opportunity

Marketing teams are busy planning the marketing campaigns like web page optimization, media participation and others. This is the one area where big data can provide the opportunity to measure the results generated by these marketing activities and will help the organizations in answering the questions like how many opportunities were created by the social media campaign. Such insights will help you see which marketing strategy is paying off and which not.

• Finding the true ROI of marketing

With the help of big data you are able to gain more insight on the ROI for every single dollar spent on each of your marketing initiative. With less approximations and intuitive math your organization’s ROI will become clear like a crystal.

• Identifying the value of the visitor

Your products are visited by thousands of visitors. It would be great if you are able to identify the company of the visitor using the reverse IP lookup and combine this with the external data like employee size, technology and send these relevant trends to the outbound marketing team.

• Identifying the priority of an inbound lead

Once the prospect has announced its interest in your product by visiting your website, you can attach several external variables to the prospect’s record like demographic or behavioral which will further help you in understanding the priority of the inbound lead.

• Increase the product use and decrease the customer support needs by using the customer marketing

Marketing actually starts once the new customer has joined in by educating the customer on your product’s features. Effective customer marketing always leads to fewer calls to customer support which in turn saves you the big organizational expense. Big data has the ability to connect the best practices of the marketing and the customer support